TECH & AI
SUSTAINABLE INNOVATION IN DATA CENTRES: A BRIEF HISTORY
Panthalassa’ s approach to powering data centres is left-field, but it isn’ t the only company thinking outside the box when it comes to sustainable AI.
Take the concept of industrial symbiosis, for instance. This process is very similar to district heating, insofar as it takes wasted heat from data centres and uses the energy elsewhere.
In the 2010s, Telecity Group warmed a living arboretum in Paris with server heat, using it to simulate 2050 climate conditions for botanical research.
In Scandinavia, operators began piping excess heat into district heating networks, a practice now common in Helsinki and mandated across the EU from 2025.
Norway’ s Green Mountain took this logic to its logical extreme, using heated discharge water to farm lobsters.
Meanwhile, engineers looked to geography for natural cooling. China’ s Eastern Data, Western Computing initiative pushed servers into Tibet’ s cold, thin mountain air.
Microsoft, more dramatically, sank a sealed pod of 864 servers beneath the North Sea off Orkney – and found they failed eight times less often than their land-based counterparts. Though Microsoft has scrapped the idea, China’ s Highlander has since commercialised the concept off Hainan Island, cutting cooling energy by up to 90 %.
There are no hinges, flaps or gearboxes. In fact, Panthalassa’ s technology seems to include no components that might be particularly vulnerable to the hostility of openocean conditions whatsoever. The nodes recirculate the same water internally to drive the generator, producing no direct emissions and requiring no engine.
Once towed horizontally out to sea, each structure flips upright and navigates to its destination using the hydrodynamic shape of its hull alone. And because these floating data centres are so far from land, all the AI queries that go through them are handled via a SpaceX Starlink satellite connection.
58 July 2026